Can you please make your substantive points without fulminating? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

(This is not a comment on your substantive views, just a request to express them more thoughtfully, in the intended spirit of this site.)

If I had the authority to restructure the administrative state, I’d make a rule that every agency needs an anti-agency to hold it accountable. Let them swap roles every 7 years, with a consistently adversarial relationship to hold each other accountable. Basically a blue team vs. red team setup, or a blue/green deployment.

Checks and balances actually work pretty well, but we only use them at the topmost level between the three constitutionally defined branches. We need to apply the same mechanism throughout the federal bureaucracy.

That probably won't work. Blue would have an incentive to prove red failed, so if red initiated a big long term project (say, building a new high speed rail network, or a new dam, or incentives to build auto factories or whatever that cannot be done in the every X years switches happen), blue will do their best to sabotage it. This happens in politics already (e.g. public transit projects started by previous governments get sabotaged), let alone if there's an adversarial relationship by the people supposed to be directly directing and overseeing this stuff.

Hmm. I guess the “public transit projects of previous governments being sabotaged” is by design. Regardless of two-party politics, if the people vote into power a new representative who disagrees with the previous one, then they’ll kill those projects. And they’ll spend their time campaigning on the basis of that. This results in “slow government” which – at least IMO – is a Very Good Thing.

But for agencies, you want the opposite – you want fast reaction to changing environment. So in that sense, career bureaucrats are an advantage as long as they remain relatively politically independent and prioritize based on requirements more than perception. The problems arise when they become affixed to one of the parties, but without the checks and balances.

I think this is maybe okay as long as the “fast reaction” has a “fast undo.” Otherwise a new executive (and their predecessor) actually has less power than the agencies within the executive branch.

The problem with America is that it’s too good at big projects and getting them done quickly. We can improve this by adding a bureaucracy that is incentivized to stall everything. I see. Wise.

In all of human history, you think the US gov is the most corrupt? Time to crack open a history book.

This is a private bank hoarding government (tax payer) dollars for seemingly no reason. The money sure as heck wasn't being used for "climate action". As an environmentalist and just someone who thinks the gov shouldn't be offshoring billions of dollars I fully support gov orgs looking into this...

It's easy to let politics color the perception of this but I for one although I dislike the current president support this effort.

Idk why anyone who's "anti establishment" wants to rail against the gov or any reg body looking into... banks doing sketchy things with taxpayer money that should... improve the environment and tax payer's lives.

What on earth happened to ppl on HN?

Most of the hackers got rich, and also a bunch of people who aren’t hackers/nerds/curious people jumped on the tech bandwagon for money, and have done well enough to view themselves as equals to the politicians and bigwigs. It has really changed the dynamic here and elsewhere, as you note

This is an incredibly false characterization of the situation. Demanding that accounts be frozen while producing zero evidence for your claims isn't an investigation. Nor is it even following the bare minimum of the law.

So, were are the arrests for all the "fraud"? Congress spent the money, it's not for Trump to steal.

Where were you when they were changing the laws just to prosecute Trump?

And now saving the money from democrtats' money laundering schemes is suddenly "Gestapo".

The amount of derangement is unbelievable.

If you didn’t have the benefit of your preferred news sources, would you still believe this?

I found out about Biden's family money laundering from NYTimes

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/arts/design/hunter-biden-...

Of course as is typical this comment comes with no evidence.

Meanwhile we're supposed to believe that Trump supporters care about corruption when he did this?

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/10/g-s1-47817/trump-pardon-rod-b...

Yeah... neither party has leg to stand on when it comes to pardons. That specific pardon wasn't even the worst within the preceding 30 days!

Now do Hunter Biden.

The current regime.

The hero and godking of many on this very forum, Elon Musk is supposedly doing that.